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During their weekend training sessions they particularly emphasised practical exercises they pushed their scooters to the top of steep roads and sand dunes and up the rocky paths of Table Mountain. Expedition members no longer drove to work, they walked and instead of taking elevators they used the staircase. Therefore intense physical training was a top priority. The six men knew that the expedition would entail severe exertion and hardship. The Vespas were painted in the colours of Namibian ‘indigenous’ animals.Īll this had begun with a dream of being the first to put down tyre tracks inside the canyon. These sponsored scooters, when donated, weren’t operational or roadworthy and had to be rebuilt with spares – also thankfully supplied by Grosvenor Motors who had the Vespa franchise at that time.

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It’s mostly made-up of a series of varying sized smaller pools (sometimes just puddles) separated by huge boulders and other obstacles like fine soft sand and thick caked mud.Įarlier, the Cape Town Vespa Club had made a bet that some its own members would be the first to take a vehicle through the canyon and three scooters were sponsored by Grosvenor Motors, and tuned for ‘canyon conditions’ by six friends Johnnie Johnson (Expedition leader), Graham Nell (Club Captain), Tony Beckley, Terry Davidson, Peter Derichs and Aubrey Jackson. In the dry and peak hiking season (May to September) there’s almost no water with the exception of one or two long pools. The river is seasonal, flowing in the rainy season from January to April and can become a raging torrent. It’s also considered to be one of Southern Africa’s toughest hikes. It is the largest canyon in the southern hemisphere and is the second largest canyon in the world (the USA’s Grand Canyon being the largest). In 1968 the Cape Town Vespa Club took on the biggest canyon in the southern hemisphere, the Fish River Canyon situated in Namibia.

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See Classic Scooterist, issue 113 (Feb/March 2017) for full feature This is a story of three Vespas and their fearless team on an epic adventure. The words of Julius Caesar “Veni, Vidi, Vici” used in the title of this article translate from Latin into English as “I came, I saw, I conquered”. Vespas resting amongst the rocks may provide some strange images – but there’s nothing stranger than what took place in South West Africa (in what’s now known as Namibia) during 1968.